I've started to self learn latin a few weeks ago, from scratch. I first used the Cambridge course book till lesson 6 with no problems. At that point, when they start to present verbs in the past, i felt like i needed some stronger grammar base, so got my hands on Wheelock's and i'm working now on lesson 2.
I've done all exercises (including the back of the book ones) with very little trouble. That is, till i decided to do them again, but inverted, using the answers as questions, so i had to go from english to latin more often.
The problem i'm having relates to the placement of the pronoum "me" in the latin frases. I get it in the wrong place 90% of the time. when i place it before the verb, it should go after and vice versa.
I'm melting my brains trying to figure out a pattern here but had no success so far, so i decided to post and see if any of you could give a hand with this issue. thanks a lot

it is highly unlikely that you are wrong in your placement of pronouns. As you will know, the grammatical function of a word in a latin sentence is not determined by word order, but by its case.

the consequence is that word order is inherently free, for example,

vir amat feminam
amat vir feminam
feminam amat vir

all mean the exact same thing: the man loves the woman.

The same concept applies to pronouns and any other word.

All that said, there is a fairly standard word order in latin namely, "subject object verb" (SOV). However there is no right or wrong about not using this 'standard' word order.

Take no note of this for now, but as you will later discover, the order of words may be mixed up for effect, or emphasis on certain words, the idea being that the first word of the sentence has more emphasis than latter words. however this should not concern you at all for the present.

If you like, you could give some examples of the sentences you are dealing with, but it would be highly unlikely that your placement of the pronouns is 'wrong'.

You'll find as you continue on that word order is not as important in Latin as in English. However, there is a standard order that is usually used unless special emphasis or some other effect is intended. Subject Object Verb is the general order of words in Latin sentences. If you look at chapter 3 in your Wheelock's there's a section about word order that should get you on the right track.... As you read more Latin the order will start to become natural to you.

Well, I'm not an expert, but I prefer the word order above on the right-hand side (except for the 5th and 8th). The "si" clause comes first logically in time so is best going first in Latin, I would say, unless you wanted to emphasize something over it. I think the 4th sounds very unusual, like shouting: "Please BLEAT to warn ME." I could be wrong. I think what follows sounds "Please bleat to WARN me" and then "Please BLEAT to warn me" (or "May you BLEAT to warn me"). [I don't know another translation for "bebo". Is there one?â€”Maybe "shout out" or "bellow" as in "mugio" or "emugio"?]

Brilliant! Laughing Unfortunately, my mistakes usually come down to grammar rather than to typos. I wish it were otherwise.

Hehe... i'm not even aware of my grammatical mistakes. I'm fluent in 3 languages, but know no gammar for any of them. Most of my time studying latin is wasted learning grammar basics, so i can have an idea of what my textbooks are talking about.

An hour spent doing grammar excersizes backwards and forwards is an hour that might have been spent actually acquiring latin the only way possible - through comprehensible input, whether by reading Orberg or any other graded reading material.

Grammar excersizes can be satisfying to do in their own right but you don't acquire fluency in reading that way. It depends what your goals are I guess.

Consider a sports analogy. It's good for a football player to spend some time in the weight room each week. But if he spent 2 hours a day lifting weights and 30 minutes a day playing football we would say that he has his priorities a little messed up.

Grammar work is good - about 15% of your "latin time" should be dedicated to grammar work. The rest should be spent reading, getting "comprehensible input" and for a newbie Orberg is probably the best though there may be others. Listening to the latinum podcasts where latin is spoken in the form of simple questions and answers counts also.

MarcusE wrote:Consider a sports analogy. It's good for a football player to spend some time in the weight room each week. But if he spent 2 hours a day lifting weights and 30 minutes a day playing football we would say that he has his priorities a little messed up.

I like the way you put that, and I have to agree... I've used Wheelock to get the grammar down, but I didn't let myself get bogged down too much. I think a traditional textbook is fine, but you should push through as fast as you can.. even if you don't understand everything the first time it's presented it will eventually start to fall together through constant exposure. Of course, I had previous exposure to Greek and Hebrew so the concepts of case, verb endings etc. was not new to me.

When I said "most of my time is wasted studying grammar", I didn't mean Latin grammar, but basic Spanish and English grammar so I can understand Latin grammar. So when i see something like "...present and imperfect subjunctives, the perfect and the plueperfect..." i have no idea of what it means. I have then to stop with latin, look it up and study it, and then go back to Latin, therefore wasting time i should be using for Latin.

In other words, my decison to learn Latin is forcing me to study stuff I managed to bypass when I should have learnt it, long ago.

But, anyways, as you can see in my first post above, I began using the Cambridge Latin Course book, that i believe follows Orberg's method, but when i got to lesson 6 i felt that I should get a better grammatical base, so i started using Wheelock too, and I'm very happy with the results. I'm so happy, to be honest, that i'm having a hard time going back ocasionally to the Cambridge course, opting for Wheelock most of the time.

Arkan wrote:When I said "most of my time is wasted studying grammar", I didn't mean Latin grammar, but basic Spanish and English grammar so I can understand Latin grammar. So when i see something like "...present and imperfect subjunctives, the perfect and the plueperfect..." i have no idea of what it means. I have then to stop with latin, look it up and study it, and then go back to Latin, therefore wasting time i should be using for Latin. ...

A book you may find helpful on the subject:
English Grammar for Students of Latin. Norma Goldman (et al?)

I thought it was UGA press, but see it is not. Amazon has several from under $4.00 up.

There are perhaps some simplistic explanations on some topics (mine, somewhere so special I cannot find it, is an older edition), but it makes looking up topics pretty simple, with some nice explanations.

hi adrian, we can only apply the label "strong" or "weak" to a pronoun once we already know where it goes (on the basis of objective criteria). the only objective criteria I have found for pronouns which fall outside of Wackernagel position (i.e. which don't go immediately after first position, which is the the spot for clitics pursuant to Wackernagel's law) are those in my Rules 1 to 3. these are the only three i have found to date which are objective but i assume there are more.

you could label pronouns satisfying Rules 1, 2 or 3, or some of them, "strong", but this would simply define the word "strong" (as being a pronoun which satisfies Rule 1, 2 or 3) and would not allow you to apply the label in reverse (i.e. to say that this or that pronoun is "strong", and therefore it satisfies Rule 1, 2 or 3, and therefore can go at the start of the clause). the labels give you terminology to divide up pronouns into those which fall in a certain position and those which don't, but the labels can't help you work out which words they should themselves apply to. for this we need objective criteria.

i applied the rules above and suggested changes to your versions of arkan's answers on the basis of this; it had nothing to do with my sense of latin "style": i don't have one and am not in a position to correct anyone else's and certainly not yours, as you are far better at latin than me.

OK. I'm very much a novice in linguistics, so I can only discuss from a common sense viewpoint and by seeking coherence in the arguments of what I've read in general and of Devine and Stephens (D&S, Latin Word Order: Structured Meaning and Information, Oxford University Press, 2006) on this in particular. So in putting this to you, cb, I'm merely simulating confidence and you could well imagine that I'm either misreading or misunderstanding because of inexperience.
Licet. LinguisticÃ¢ de scientiÃ¢, tiro sum. IdeÃ² ego disputans communem sensum credo, et contextum argumentorum quae et in universum et apud D&S super rem propositam legi. Sic corÃ m confiteor, simulo ut cum auctoritatem scribam. RectÃ¨ opinetur me scribere sine curÃ¢ magno labore partÃ¢.

D&S, p.8 wrote:So for instance if you do not accept that there is such a thing as neutral word order in Latin, the question of whether Latin is a scrambling language does not even arise...

Neutrally, the verb comes at the end of the sentence so in a sentence with just a pronoun and a verb, the pronoun is the first word and the verb is the second. Neutro casu, verbum sententiam terminat; itaquÃ¨ cum sententia solÃ¹m pronomen et verbum habebit, pronomen primum erit et verbum secundum.

Also your first rule needs to be adjusted, because non-contrastive pronouns can also go first in a clause.Regula prima etiam mutanda est, quiÃ licet pronomen quod sine contrarietate stat clausulam incipiat.

According to D&S, word order is influenced by whether a word or collocation or phrase is a focus or a topic or a tail. A focus conveys new information, a topic old information and a tail old information that is more especially incidental or, as they themselves put it:

D&S, p.17 wrote:Tails serve to lexically instantiate arguments that are obligatorily projected but are not topics or foci, and at the same time to confirm the hearer's assumptions or refresh his memory about old or inferable information.

Nor are these classifications hard and fast:

D&S, p.16 wrote:While topic is principally associated with old information and focus with new information, the correlation is not dependable. It is perfectly possible for old information to be (weakly or strongly) focussed whether it is topical or not, even pronouns (22) uter nostrum tandem, Labiene, popularis est, tune...an ego? (Pro Rab Perd 11).

In D&S, pp 277-312 are about weak pronouns. Your rules are for weak pronouns (tails) and exclude pronouns which are topics or have focus (strong or weak).

Take the sentences/itÃ vide: "If I make a mistake, they let me know. " and "If they make a mistake, he lets me know." In both sentences "me" has focus (and so does the verb, of course, as well). In the first you can read "They let someone know and that someone is me" or "the person that they let know is me" and in the second "the person he lets know is me" and "He lets someone know and that someone is me" In the second sentence "me" is new information certainly, but in the first it is old information. You cannot read "me" necessarily as a tail in those sentences in any way that fits D&S's definition of a tail. The sentence is just too short for the pronoun to be considered necessarily a tail. It can therefore be the first word in the sentence. It could of course come after the verb if you wanted to stress the verb, as in a command say or given some context.

Cb, if strong pronouns are unexplainable exceptions to your rules, then your rules must be wonky.*

you refer to pg. 280 of D&S which shows some non-contrastive pronouns going first in the clause, and suggest I should adjust my rules. I agree that these are exceptions but donâ€™t see how I can adjust my rules, because D&S do not give any objective criterion for why this happens.

When a pronoun functions in one of these identifiable roles and occupies its neutral position, it doesn't require in-depth analysis. "Ei statim scripsi" (Ad Att 8.1.2) isn't exceptional; it conforms to the neutral word order. "Ei" can be presumed strong, and presumed to have focus by default. "Me paenitet" conforms to the neutral word order. It is "paenitet me" which begs to be justified (as it can be, of course).
Once again, D&S very explicitly state that what they are addressing on pp.277-312 are weak pronouns (tails) and what is interesting and revealing about them. They certainly don't say that strong pronouns are exceptional or even mysterious. Strong pronouns reveal less because, by default, they will tend to conform to the neutral word order, and their departures from the neutral will be explained relative to the neutral default positions. So the position of the pronoun "ego" in "Egone non intellego quid sit... Latine voluptas? (De Fin 2.12) p.240.
Also the position of a relative pronoun in first position is not exceptional "qui praesidio navibus essent (BG 5.9) or "ii qui valetudine aut aetate inutiles sint bello" p.198
Also "id" in "Id est oppidum Parisiorum (BG 7.57)" is in first position, p.200, or "Id autem difficile non est (BG 7.23) p.202. "Id difficile non est..." (BC 3.86)

Of course, maybe I'm completely wrong and your rules are empirically sound. (They are, of course, correct for what they includeâ€”weak pronounsâ€” but misleading for what they exclude, I think.)

hi Adrian, thanks again for looking at this. the two things I will adopt from your post are:

(a) i will call the rules "Rules for personal pronouns and reflexives in Golden prose"; this is all I have been referring to in this discussion: see the sihler part I scanned and linked above, the majority of the e.g.s given in the pronouns section of D&S, the e.g.s from Cicero I have referred to, etc., and I don't want to suggest that the same rules cover relatives, demonstratives &c. (each of which i think requires separate treatment, even if others think that conceptually they should be considered together); and

(b) i agree with you that later it would be good to look at poetry, however the word order there could be partially affected by the metre and so requires separate treatment.

on the other points:

(a) "strong" pronouns are not as a whole unexplainable exceptions to my rules; the D&S section covers strong as well as weak pronouns (see e.g. pg 279 on contrastive pronouns which are labelled strong, i.e. out of Wackernagel position, and are covered by my Rule 1). apologies for being unclear: i didn't mean that "weak" pronouns are what my rules only cover, and "strong" pronouns are the exceptions; what i meant was that each of the rules (whether covering pronouns carrying the label "strong" or "weak") has exceptions. having exceptions does not make a rule useless: in practice it actually makes you focus more on each exception and read more about it, to try to find out why it doesn't fall within the same pattern, and even if you can't explain it, you have at least identified that it looks different somehow from the instances which satisfy the rule, and so you concentrate a little bit more on it. i am not aiming at a perfect science of pronouns but something which is useful for me when reading. if I put aside concepts like "strong" and "weak" and "verb last" and "topic" and "focus" and "emphasis", and just apply the objective criteria to Golden prose, they work OK, even if according to these concepts they "shouldn't" work: see e.g. the INTERROGAS ME quote from Cicero in my previous post which breaches the "verb last" concept but follows the rules. if the rules are fundamentally flawed on a conceptual level, that doesn't bother me if they get the word order roughly right anyway: e.g. see in Rule 5 how I talk about inserting "false" punctuation, simply to try to reflect the word order we see in those cases; it would be easy to argue that this process of inserting "false" puncuation is wrong on a conceptual level.

(b) what i would like to see are more exceptions to my rules in Golden prose. if you have some, please let me know the refs and i will modify the rules accordingly. the process of talking about these things with others like you, looking at exceptions, and realising the rules i have found so far can be improved, is v helpful; in particular, when there are frequent expressions which break the rules, e.g. MIHI CREDE where MIHI is at the start of the clause, I want to make a list of these.

Contrastive pronouns are certainly strong, but not all strong pronouns are necessarily contrastive. Here is what D&S say (as you know):

D&S. p.279 wrote:Most instances of sentence initial pronouns in Latin seem to be strong. Some are demonstrably contrastive.

That statement makes great sense to me. But you want to rule for demonstrable contrastives and not for strong pronouns, so you leave the larger class minus the minority class as exceptional cases and the minority class as the norm. That won't do, surely, especially when you recommend casting "me monent" (Direct Object - Verb) over "monent me" (Verb - Direct Object) on the principle that "me" is a personal pronoun and according to your Rule 4, without reference to (general) neutral word order.

Anyway, I consider your work heroic, cb. Thanks for the stimulus to look more closely at D&S, which has sat on the shelf for the last two years.

Hi adrian, i don't understand what concrete changes you are suggesting i should make but if you have some quotes of e.g. clauses in Golden prose which are just pron plus verb in that order (equivalent to your ME MONENT) and don't follow the rules (in particular Rule 1), I would be grateful if you could let me know the refs and I will modify the rules if they are in the majority (compared to the reverse order which Cicero used for INTERROGAS ME) as i think you suggest in your post above. I think you are suggesting that my rules do not cover the "majority" of pronoun positions; if so i want to fix that, but so far the rules generally reflect the order i see in Golden prose rather than the minority of cases.

it is the concrete latin examples themselves and the patterns based on objective criteria, rather than alll this "strong" and "weak" terminology, which i want to look at, because patterns based on that new terminology seem to me to say "this type of word generally goes here, except when it doesn't", without giving any objective criterion for choosing between the options. thanks again for your help, cheers, chad

cool thanks v much adrian, this looks great. i will read through the list and see what improvements i can make to the rules to make them more accurate. i have no stats on latin word order. cheers, chad

But without statistical testing, you have quesses, not rules. You are already aware of exceptions but not sure how many there are. I suspect you have based your rules on a very small, selective sample of sentences. So I can reframe your rules as in the following way, to expose them more objectively:Sine documento autem statisticis utente, non regulas sed conjecturas habes. Exceptiones iam cognoscis at quantam ignoras. Cum regulas tuas construxisti, minimum sententiarum benÃ¨ selectivarum numerum dependisse te suspicor. Ergo regulas tuas ut praepositiones itÃ construere possum, ut plus ad sensum cadant:

2. In an infinitive phrase, a pronoun goes first, except when it doesn't,â€”which MIGHT be most of the time!3. A pronoun governed by a preposition follows the preposition, except when it doesn't in particular cases. 4. Otherwise, pronouns go immediately after first position, except when they don't,â€”which MIGHT be most of the time!

hi adrian, i got the rules from devine and stephens 2006. this is the best authority i have found so far. if you have a ref to another good source on latin word order, or some stats, please let me know: i find it useful when others share their sources with me: e.g. will has done this for me more than once: and so i try to do the same by scanning on a particular issue parts of authorities i have which some others may not have. others can check the scanned chapter of devine and stephens on pronouns which i linked to in my first post in this thread and take away the points (if any) they find useful: i took away what i found useful.

when i have time i will try to prepare my own stats on latin word order: the exercise of compiling these will be at least as helpful as the actual results; in the meantime thanks again for the list above, cheers